Peter Honey once described how, when he was working as a consultant, he felt the need to look busy. “When my partner comes in I start typing… to make it look as though I was working…” Many people are filling up their work-at-home time with online meetings on Zoom to make themselves look busy. Lots of talk but often no decisions. It seems to takes responsibility away. That’s just taking bad office habits home. We all see over the rest of this year a shift in the property market as charities and companies flee London and city centres. UK Banks have a £61 billion exposure in this market. Office space will be plentiful and cheap.

If there was one mistake that the Covid move to online encouraged, it was the rush to synchronous media like Zoom and other video conferencing software. It was, and is, a massive failure in understanding, the idea that to be effective, something has to be ‘live’. In practice the vast bulk of online communications is asynchronous, not live. The naive think that social literally means talking to someone live, whereas most online, social communication is not live. There’s a good reason for this. The conversations and actions that are asynchronous can go on longer, be more productive, deeper and involve more people, as well as being integrated into real learning and work tools for planning and actual activity. It is a hangover from synchronous world of offices, meetings and classrooms. Most managers are totally addicted to synchronous as it makes them feel as though things are getting done while chatting… when they’re not. Meetings are rarely effective work.

HR and LD folk should be looking at the changing nature of work, but they’re curiously absent from this debate. The shift to working at home is, to a degree yet to be determined, permanent. Yet one wonders whether traditional HR and LD has caught on? 

Many companies now see that these grandiose offices are mostly an affectation and not needed. The cost savings can be significant, allowing business recovery and growth to happen faster. In some sectors many will continue to work at home, some entirely, some with smaller office hubs where people can meet and hot-desk.

In one company I’m involved in 80% want to continue working at home, many of the others wanted a hybrid or blended model of work. Necessity has been the mother of innovation and the great pause has forced many organisations to do this experiment and find, to their surprise, that no matter how many coloured beanbags you provide, many would rather be at home.

It may result in permanent patterns of change. Big cities may be a lot emptier as workers can operate from ever more remote and rural locations. This may rebalance the economy away from London to the rest of the country. Let’s shift those headquarters of charities, organisations and companies out of cities. That would be wonderful. The inhumane spectacle of the mass commute into and out of cities may be reduced to a trickle and have an incalculable, positive impact on their physical and psychological health. This would reduce traffic and transport, a positive contribution to climate change.

Offices are full of hierarchical structures and behaviours – like parking spaces and who gets what office. There’s less room for dick swinging, as online is a sort of leveller. All sorts of bad behaviours are simply more difficult and obvious online, as they’re recorded.

You’re not arriving at work after a stressful commute, can sleep longer, feel more autonomous, more in command of your own time. If you like a little music on, you can. You’re not in a noisy environment, picking up colds and flus. This may make organisations more productive. You will see your kids more as you’re not leaving early and coming back late.

You’re not being soaked in gossip and office politics. Social interaction can be more controlled and there will be far less physicality, so less harassment. It’s not that social interaction disappears, just that much of the bad stuff will be filtered and there will be a lot less of it.

There’s less need for office clothes; suits, ties, formal wear, heels, whatever. If you do less synchronous stuff, you will be ‘seen’ less. Even in synchronous media, no one cares what you look like below head height. You will feel more comfortable.

A bonus is the acceleration of online training and the abandonment of awful classroom experiences – you know the game… where you sit at round tables, get a bad question, choose a chair, write BS on a flipchart page and that chair feeds back their views to the group. A lot of bad synchronous activity can be dumped.

Conferences literally stopped but the world kept going. Does it really make sense to spend £2000 plus to travel and exhibit at such events. Many have successfully swung online. I’ve spoken and attended a few – they’re often free, can cope with bigger numbers, save expensive travel and accommodation and you can fit the recorded asynchronous sessions into your working day. Many have reconsidered their future spend here. And it’s good for climate change. So get that into your social responsibility statement!

I’m a fan of Occam’s Razor “The minimum number of entities to reach your given goal.” It is not that offices and workplaces will disappear, only that there will be a LOT LESS. That’s fine. The future pf work is the future of blended work, a blend of on and off-site, enabled by technology. 5G, Starlink and better devices and software will accelerate this shift, making it easier, cheaper and faster.